Help, my Horse is Stumbling!

Help, my Horse is Stumbling!

The most obvious place to look when a horse begins to stumble regularly is his feet because they are after all what he is tripping over, right? While he might be stubbing them, his toes are infrequently the source of this problem. In fact, a tripping problem that shows up acutely often has nothing to do with his feet. Before you call your farrier, rule out faulty mechanics in the rest of the body.

Tripping and stumbling often develops from poor movement patterns that restrict the front limbs, progressing sometimes to the extent that a horse will fall all the way to his knees. Riding a horse that is scrambling like this can be unnerving, and it also causes a fair bit of worry for owners. They want to know what is going wrong. Why is their horse suddenly tripping and falling?

It is natural to look at the horse’s front end for blame. But I have more often found the problem in these horses to be in the HIND end. When a horse stiffens through his lower back during motion, it pushes his stifle joints out behind him, essentially blocking the hind legs from swinging forward each stride. In the absence of flexion in his pelvis and hind limb joints, the horse’s spine becomes like a rigid piston that shoves motion forward on to the forelimbs. Overburdened, these limbs lose their smoothness of movement. The result? A horse will catch his toe instead of rolling over smoothly to the next stride. Plus, the hind legs are no longer participating to catch his balance.

Until the lower back and hindquarter stiffness is resolved, the horse is likely to continue tripping. A deeper problem arises once he has tripped enough times to not be worried about it anymore. Once this occurs, he no longer hurries to get his balance. He submits to a persistent lack of coordination. The primary nerves that generate forelimb movement gradually deactivate, the horse’s whole movement pattern alters. Smoothness of movement begins to disappear.

When caught early, many tripping problems can be corrected. The most beneficial place to begin your inspection is the horse’s hind-end, unless there is a clear reason to suspect the feet as the primary problem such as the case of a new and dramatically different hoof trim. Assess the following: dorsal flexion and overall state of the back muscles (are they normal temperature and pliable? Or are they ropey, hot, tense?), stifle flexion and perceived comfort, hamstring tension. Studying your horse’s natural standing posture will factor in your inspection of these as will your hands-on touch. Once you locate what you suspect as the source of restriction, you can begin to treat it. Generally, I recommend a Masterson Method practitioner but other good body-workers can also help.

Once the body-work therapies are administered, I have found certain corrective exercises to be especially beneficial. These include: Long and Low Transitions (Ex. # 27); Figure-Eight bars (Ex. #18); Lateral Pelvic Flexion (Ex. #31); Giravolta (Ex. #46). In addition to a good amount of backing the horse up daily, these exercises will help restore equilibrium between forehand and hindquarters, which will help you on your way to overcoming a stumbling issue that seems to show up out of nowhere.

As you work through these corrective exercises and body therapies for a focused two-week period, avoid riding at speed or on hard surfaces. Both increase the likelihood for tripping.

Round Pens: training for good posture…or bad?

Believe me when I tell you that I love freedom as much as anyone. I love trimming away boundaries, living widely in each moment. And, yes, I love to watch a beautiful horse running free across a meadow with his legs surging and his expression content. That, to me, is a wonderful sight. On the other hand, a horse careening around a round pen with his neck twisted sideways and his body misaligned disgruntles me.

The reason it disgruntles me is that this practice forms—and strengthens—poor movement mechanics that can have pretty significant consequences. Primarily, when a horse travels around the round pen with his head turned slightly to the outside of the circle, he ends up catching his balance every stride by planting his inside foreleg harder. This tightens and strengthens his shoulder girdle on that side, embeds crookedness in addition to limited range of motion in the scapula.

When a horse has spent a fair amount of time in this incorrect balance, a few of the results can include: chronically cross-cantering, balky behavior under saddle, stiffness and lack of responsiveness to the rider’s leg cues when ridden. The problem is that the undesirably tight scapula muscles contributing to these problems have been made stronger by the round pen work.

I absolutely believe that round pen work has a valuable place in every horse’s training life. Much of the value comes from body alignment. The round pen is not a place to chase around a loose horse while ingraining poor habits. Unless you can 100-percent affirm that your horse’s ENTIRE spine (head to tail) follows the curve of the circle prescribed by your round pen, then you are far better off to have a line attached to his halter/cavesson/bridle.

Any exercise undertaken without a complete inwards arc of the horse’s spine to match his line of travel creates postural imbalances that become stronger each session. These imbalances are manmade and easily avoided.

Somewhere along the way, many of us have become besotted with liberty work, or exercising the horse without any reins, longe lines, etc. Liberty work IS a delightful concept, but it often comes with irony. The irony appears when students wish to change a particular movement pattern (i.e. fix a canter lead, solve a persistent crookedness) without realizing that their liberty work has contributed greatly to the problem they wish to resolve.

When it comes with the outcome of developing comfortable and functional posture for your horse, attaching a line is a gift we can offer him. It allows you to guide the horse to correct posture inside the round pen, enabling his inside scapula to rotate upwards and back each stride, which in turn allows his topline to lift and swing.

Sure, there are a small percentage of horses with fine training and balance that are able to work at liberty in a round pen while maintaining correct posture and bend. In these wonderful cases, there may be no need whatsoever to have the horse on a line. But let’s not be overly generous in our self-assessments. Far fewer of us are in this camp than we might wish to accept. A closer look at most round pens reveals the horse’s head turned slightly outside the circle, and to that I say put on a line. Allow your horse to experience his freedom in other ways, but not at the expense of solidifying poor balance.

Power in Interruption

In the following photo, Roxy demonstrates what I call the power of interruption. This describes the benefit of momentarily altering the horse’s movement patterns for the sake of improving them. Not unlike their human pals, horses generate movement through patterns held in the neuromuscular system. These patterns serve them well, allowing them to move and perform various tasks with utmost efficiency and limited active brain recruitment to move limbs. While indeed efficient, these patterns are not always optimal. For instance, Roxy has a pattern of trailing her hind legs out behind her when she trots rather than swinging them well forward underneath her body as I would prefer.

My task is to help Roxy create new patterns than the ones she knows as comfy and familiar. I would prefer her to adopt a pattern that involves a body posture that is more beneficial to her long-term wellness, or in other words one that sees her carrying more weight on her hind limbs and easing weight OFF her forelimbs. There are number of ways to go about this task, and one of my favorite ones is to interrupt a horse’s existing gait patterns.

As you can see from this photo, the exercise I’m using in this example is fairly simple. It is just a polygon shape formed with poles on the ground. With the horse on a longe line, the handler can move herself all around the polygon, directing the horse across, through, and over the poles in constantly changing ways. The horse never knows where it will be asked to enter/exit the shape. In this way, it delivers all the benefits of schooling over ground poles but eliminates the repetitive and predictable nature of sequential poles set up in single line.

Exercises like this that encourage the horse to adjust her balance, or change her speed and height of stride, briefly interrupts motor patterns. What immediately follows is a chance to develop new patterns. This might mean more awareness of stride trajectory, more flexion in hind limb joints, more precise foot placement. These kinds of exercises open the door to further improvement. They work because the horse is guided to alter his stride with minimal anxiety or tension, given that he is not receiving a lot of input or cues from a rider. The exercises are offering him the input in a very natural, easy way.

Admittedly, there is plenty of time during a horse’s schooling when we want our work to be predictable for him so he gains confidence and clarity in our expectations. When changing his physical body and gaits, though, it can be helpful to introduce a little well-timed interruption. The key is to use just a little (not so much to frustrate the horse), and that any chosen exercise has relevance to an existing pattern you hope to change. In other words, we’re not seeking to interrupt his patterns just for the sake of adding randomness or variety to his routines. The exercises need to support your specific goal in each session.

What if my Horse Gets Anxious About Ground Poles?

Occasionally while giving clinics, I encounter a horse that becomes anxious or revved up about working over ground poles or cavalletti, which are a large part of my lessons. Often frustrated or embarrassed, the rider will ask what she can do. She understands that ground pole exercises are beneficial and yet she can’t ride the horse over poles without him getting charged up.

First of all, there is no reason to become embarrassed or frustrated. Plenty of horses find their own ‘creative’ ways of negotiating pole work, including leaping sideways, bounding spastically across the poles, or standing in place snorting at them. Sometimes this is due to stress arising from past negative or forceful experiences, but other times it can be from the horse getting evasive about the task in front of him.

Fortunately, helping an anxious horse settle to a calmer approach of ground poles is usually very doable and straightforward. And it actually involves NOT crossing poles. Instead, it can be fruitful to school the horse around, between, and through poles for a while without asking him to travel over them. Once he has relaxed in to a steady rhythm and body posture during these tasks, then he transitions seamlessly to riding across the poles.

Exercises that ask him to organize his body while bending or turning around, but not over, poles help him approach the objects as just another part of his steady work routine rather than something different, exciting, or scary. Often it takes just a day or two to accomplish this, but give yourself as much time as you need. Rushing the horse in this process generally only causes his leaping or evasion of poles to persist.

When you’re able to practice these two exercises without fanfare, you will be riding across cavalletti routines in no time. And then you will be reaping all the goodness they have to offer.

Dressage Principles that Sound Like Zen Riddles

It sounded like one of those Zen riddles intended to puzzle my brain until it staggered upon some flicker of enlightenment. Forward does not mean faster, my dressage instructor annunciated, her exasperation rising. And then with the next breath she waggled her longe whip towards me to assist in creating a forward-but-not-faster movement.

My Welsh pony surged ahead in a bone-rattling trot as our speed ticked up, and I gleaned from my instructor’s grimace that I was failing her proverb. As I understood it, I needed to get my pony’s hind legs moving with more activity and energy. But how was I supposed to do that without changing her speed? For as simple as it was in theory, I found out the concept of riding a horse correctly “forward” was surprisingly elusive in practice.

I’ve observed numerous dressage riders banging their legs on their horses’ sides to get the horse moving more ‘forward’ until they are charging around the arena in a state of tension or frenzy. Just as often, I see riders who are unwilling to ride this way plodding around on a horse that appears disinterested and utterly disengaged with the work he is doing. Neither scenario is ideal. Nor are they the correct interpretation of riding a horse “forward.”

What IS the correct interpretation? A Western trainer I admire named Tom Pierson defined it best, and I think he did so without even realizing he was talking about dressage. He said working with a horse is like constantly checking in with the temperature gauge on your car. When the car is running right, the needle on your gauge should be directly in the middle of the spectrum between too hot and too cold. Think of your horse’s attention and focus being this way, he explained. You do not want him so hyper alert and fired up that the needle on your gauge tips one way. Nor do you want him so tuned out and sleepy that it tips the other way. You want it in the middle. Always.

Lately, I have begun to adopt the Western terminology of “readiness” in favor of the word “forward” that we dressage riders have relied on. No matter whether I am mid-stride in an extended trot, a halt, or a canter transition my horse needs to be fully ready and responsive for the next cue I give. When he is in this state, he travels with the activity and engagement in his limbs that we pursue as evidence that he is correctly moving ‘forward.’ In other words, nobody needs to chase after me waggling a longe whip to create a desirable amount of engagement. And I do not need to keep my horse in a state of chomping edginess masquerading as liveliness and energy.

Of course, even the term “readiness” would have been murky for a 13-year-old to solve so it still might have taken me years to arrive at the understanding that good, classical dressage requires a horse to be alert but not frenzied. If I could offer one tip for how to keep your horse in a state of readiness without chasing him unnecessarily faster, it would be the following.

At various moments during your ride, no matter what you are doing (or not doing), ask yourself: does it feel like I could instantly and immediately extend my horse’s stride right now? Does it feel just as likely that I could stop him on a dime without encountering resistance? If these answers are yes, chances are good that you’ve done well keeping him in a state of readiness. If the answer if no—and be honest with yourself—it would be a good idea to prioritize spending a week or so of your training working solely on this.

Operating with the above question in mind as you ride will inform your training considerably. The next time you are riding around practicing elusive dressage ideals and you think to yourself I think this trot is pretty good…but is it good enough?, ask yourself the readiness question and you will have your answer.